Thursday, July 17, 2014

Retail-Level Tyranny

Yes, but they're very good at stringing up the crime scene tape.

“The police are
worthless. I don't know what we're paying them for.”

That familiar,
despairing lament was voiced by a friend here in Payette after his family had lost
$20,000 worth of property a burglary. The crime was solved before the police intervened:
Some of the pilfered property was still in possession of the suspects, who
admitted that it didn't belong to them. Working on their own initiative, my
friend and his adult daughter -- the primary victim -- tracked down more of the
stolen goods at local yard sales and garage sales.

A phone call to
the Payette PD led to a visit by an officer who was courteous, professional,
and who provided no practical help of any kind. He did arrest one suspect, a
mentally deficient man who readily admitted to the officer that he had taken
the property because an unspecified “they” had told him it was “all right” to
do so.

Neither the
responding officer, nor the colleague who took over the case when the first
officer went on vacation, expended any effort to identify who “they” were, or
to press charges against the accomplices. The case was closed with the arrest
of a solitary man – a registered sex offender -- who “became somewhat upset
[because] he was the only one who was going to be in trouble for the thefts
that occurred, because he was honest,” as an investigative report summarized.

For one thing, they don't dress as well.

“The police
wouldn't bother to fingerprint my stolen property,” Elizabeth Puckett, the
owner of the property, recounted to me. “When I asked why, the officer said,
`Well, we're not CSI.'” It shouldn't be assumed that the Payette PD is
consistently insouciant about the collection of forensic evidence. A few years
ago, Puckett recalls, she received a visit from the Animal Control officer (an official with whom I've had some
experience) after the
department received a report that “we had a dog that looked like a pit bull.”

A county ordinance enacted several years ago during a spasm
of civic alarm forbids residents to “own, possess, keep, exercise control over,
maintain, harbor, transport, buy or sell” pit bulls or “dangerous dogs”
displaying pit bull characteristics. Those who owned such dogs prior to
enactment of the ban were required to register them with the police (who were
exempt from the ordinance, of course), “keep $1 million liability insurance,
have a microchip ID … implanted in the dog, and pay an annual pit bull license
fee.” Dogs owned by people not in compliance with the edict “are subject to
impoundment and destruction.”

“The officer told
us that if we were going to keep it we would have to have a blood test,”
Elizabeth recalled. “So I would have had to pay $100 for a blood test, and
still could lose the dog if it displayed the wrong `characteristics.' So I just
let the dog go.”

The same Payette
Police Department that couldn't help Elizabeth recover her stolen property was diligent in taking her property, even though she had done no injury to anybody
else. This is because the Payette PD, like every other agency of its kind, is
involved in law enforcement, rather than the protection of persons and
property. It defines its role in terms of what its officers can do to
people, rather than what they are required to do for people.

No, Police Don’t Work for
You

When a disgusted
citizen tells an abusive police officer that he pays the officer's salary, the
victim is committing a category
error. Those of us who constitute the productive sector don't pay the
police; they are paid by the people who plunder our property at gunpoint. Once
it is understood that police employed by the people who commit aggression
against our property, we shouldn't be surprised that police are of practically
no value in terms of protecting property against
criminal aggression. Police are properly seen as retail-level distributors of violence
on behalf of the coercion cartel.

Law enforcement
is a “product” we are forced to buy, and severely punished – through summary
application of torture, or even by death – if we refuse. Since law enforcement operates as a
monopoly, rather than through the market, there is no legitimate pricing
mechanism to guide rational allocation of resources, and no way to measure
“customer” satisfaction – although using the term “customer” in this context is
a bit like using the term “girlfriend” to describe a rape victim.

Indeed, the
institutional response of law enforcement to public dissatisfaction is to
expand and escalate the behavior that inspired the discontent, and treat
persistent criticism as evidence of criminal intent. Witness recent
developments in Albuquerque, where outrage over serial police homicides –
including the death squad-style murder last March of James Boyd, an unarmed
homeless man – generated a substantial organized protest movement.

After infuriated protesters took control of a
city council meeting to
place the defiant APD Chief Gorden Eden “on trial,” the city government’s
reaction was not to cashier the official who had instigated the outrage, but
rather to impose new restrictions on citizen participation in city council meetings.

The Albuquerque
Police Department, like dozens of others nation-wide, has displayed what the
Justice Department calls a “pattern and practice” of excessive force. If it
were a private corporation, it would be the target of lawsuits and, most
likely, criminal prosecution. Unlike a private entity, however, a police
department is protected by the fiction of “sovereign immunity,” and its
employees are shielded from personal accountability through “qualified
immunity.”

While exceptionally
corrupt police departments are occasionally disbanded, their “markets” are quickly
captured by other agencies that will provide the same “service.” Individual
police officers who distinguish themselves through abusive and criminal
behavior -- which, given the competition, is a significant accomplishment – sometimes
find themselves briefly unemployed. However, they often become “gypsy cops” and find employment elsewhere as
state-licensed purveyors of violence.

Both the “labor”
and materials involved in fulfilling that records request have already been
paid for. The information – which, interestingly, was not provided to the
defense as discovery during a recently-concluded trial – should be easy to
find. All that is necessary would be for a MCSO functionary to insert a CD into
a computer and click a mouse. A single CD – assuming that Malheur County buys
them in bulk – would cost less than
twenty cents. The market rate for an hour of
labor by a “copy specialist” is less than nine dollars. The amount cited to
me by Undersheriff Johnson reflects the price structure of a monopoly, which in
this case is trying to impede public scrutiny of its actions by making it cost-prohibitive
to pursue public records requests.

Opacity of this
kind is hardly compatible with a “public service” agency. It is entirely
appropriate, however, for an entity that sees the public as hostile and thus
makes “operational security” a priority.

Even before “local”
police agencies were effectively satellitized by the federal government they
were paramilitary bodies designed to operate as occupation forces, rather than
as a protective service. In creating his London Metropolitan Police, Robert
Peel adapted the model he had employed in creating the “Peace Preservation
Force,” a specialized unit within the 20,000-man military contingent Peel
had commanded as military governor of occupied Ireland.

Peel’s Militaristic Model

Writing in the
December 1961 Journal of Modern History,
Galen Broekker observed that when Peel was appointed governor in 1814, his
objective in creating the Peace Preservation Force was “`pacifying’ a recalcitrant
population.” For several years prior to Peel’s appointment, rural insurgents
called “banditti” had been fighting among themselves and occasionally attacking
British outposts. Of much greater concern to occupation authorities, however,
was evidence of involvement by “respectable people” in “insurrectionary
activity of a political nature.”

At the time of Peel’s
arrival, the crime rate in Ireland wasn’t particularly high, so he took
advantage of a “lull” to “muster the forces of authority in anticipation of the
inevitable trouble to come” as English authorities took aggressive action to
stamp out separatism. The “Peace Preservation Force” – which was the prototype
for every modern police agency – wasn’t designed to protect person and property
from criminal aggression, but rather to protect a political elite. This is why Peel’s
London Metropolitan Police Force was initially greeted with hostility by
conservatives in the British Parliament and the public at large, who often
referred to officers as “Blue Locusts.” Within a decade, however, Peel’s model
was firmly entrenched in London, and migrated across the Atlantic to New York
City.

As evangelists of
“Manifest Destiny” carved their bloody path to the Pacific, an Americanized
version of Peel’s police concept was among the chief tenets of their gospel of
government-imposed “civilization.” It wasn’t until the early 1970s, however,
that the latent militarism of the police was given expression when the Nixon
administration declared “war” on drugs. This led to the proliferation of SWAT
teams, which were modelled after counter-insurgency units organized by the CIA
as part of its Phoenix Program in Vietnam.

Declining Crime, Escalating
Police Militarism

Beginning in the
1970s, the official rhetoric of law enforcement became overtly martial, a
tendency that has grown in crescendo. However, by most measures, violent crime has been
in decline for five decades. A similar trend is visible regarding on-the-jo
b police fatalities. Joseph McNamara, former NYPD Deputy Inspector, points
out that police “work” is actually much safer today than it has been in a
half-century or more. Law enforcement is not found in the top ten “most
dangerous occupations” in the annual list compiled by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics.

As was the case when Peel created his “Peace Preservation
Force” in Ireland two centuries ago, the Power Elite has been relentlessly
expanding its domestic army of occupation and indoctrinating those enlisted
therein to see the public as its enemy – “ in anticipation of the inevitable
trouble to come.”

“This is
absolutely ludicrous to think that the equipment that is utilized by law
enforcement is utilized for any reason except for public safety interests, and
it happens across this nation every day in a responsible way,” harrumphed
Florida Republican Representative Rich Nugent, a former sheriff. Nugent is
correct about one thing: Military-grade hardware and war-fighting tactics are used by police “every day”: On
average, there are 124 SWAT deployments every day, nearly all of them carried
out as drug enforcement raids or to enforce routine search warrants. Many, if not
most, of those raids are carried out after sunset or before the dawn.

There is no country on earth where citizens are more likely to experience the “midnight
knock” than the United States of America. That fact surely reflects the
interests of those who want to monopolize power, rather than a market demand
for “security.”

Keynesian Cops

As part of the
Obama administration’s “stimulus” package in 2009, the Justice Department
increased spending on its Byrne grant and COPS programs – two major conduits
for local law enforcement subsidies – by more
than $4 billion. At the same time, the Pentagon expanded
its 1033 program, through which military-grade hardware and vehicles are
provided, on concessionary terms, to local police. The predictable, and
subsequently observed, impact of this example of police state Keynesianism was
a dramatic escalation in police militancy toward the public. But these
federally created distortions in the “security” market have created other, less
visible burdens on the public as well.

In the hierarchy
of public concerns, “officer comfort” apparently resides very close to the
sacred imperative of “officer safety.” Rather than requiring his subordinates
to adapt to their vehicles in order to serve their “customers” better,
Kingsbury insists on getting another $441,000 in plundered funds to serve the
creature comfort of Nampa’s costumed tax-feeders.

Question: If the
need for new patrol vehicles is so acute, why doesn't the Nampa PD sell off its
spanking-new MRAP, which has a listed market value of about $500,000? Like
hundreds of other departments, the Nampa PD got the MRAP not because of an
actual need, but because the Pentagon was willing to give it to them at
practically no expense. If we were to assume that the SUV patrol vehicles are a
“necessity,” the MRAP should be regarded as a luxury and liquidated as such.
That’s how a market-based enterprise would operate, in any case.

However, the
only market for MRAPs consists of other police departments that can get
them from the Pentagon at negligible expense. Even if the people running the
Nampa PD were sufficiently rational and mature to sell off their dangerous new
toy, they wouldn’t find a buyer. Unless austerity is somehow imposed on the
Nampa PD, the city’s tax victims will eventually be forced to pay nearly the
entire price of the “free” MRAP that was provided to the department – a vehicle
that has no conceivable use other than providing “force protection” during SWAT
raids of the kind that have become commonplace.

Predation, not protection

Like most other
police agencies, the Nampa PD devours roughly half the municipal budget, and
much of that expense is devoted to salaries. In
2010, seven of the ten highest-paid municipal positions in Nampa were filled by
“public safety” officials, only one of whom – Fire Chief Karl Malott – was
not a police officer. Coming in at number four on that list was Corporal (now Sergeant)
Jason Cantrell, who received $104,173 in total compensation – nearly as much as
then-Chief Bill Augsburger. Another corporal, Chadrick Shepard, finished at
ninth place on the list with an annual haul of $93,559.

New York City was the first jurisdiction to adopt Peel's model of paramilitary policing. Three years ago, NYPD officer Terrance Howell, who had been sent to find a deranged slasher-killer named Maxim Gelman, who had murdered three people, watched from the operator's booth of a subway car while a martial arts expert named Joseph Lozito tackled and subdued the suspect. As Gelman slashed at the back of Lozito's head, the desperate, bleeding man pleaded for help from Officer Howell, who did nothing to intervene. It was not until after Lozito had pinned Gelman to the floor and disarmed him that Howell emerged from his secure location and told Lozito, "You can get up now."

Howell, the "hero cop" who was photographed triumphantly escorting Gelman in handcuffs, admitted to a member of a grand jury that he had hid from the suspect out of fear for his safety. After Lozito filed a tort claim for negligence, city attorney David Santoro explained that "Under well-established law, the police are not liable for such incidents" because police have "no special duty" to protect any individual citizen -- even one who is literally bleeding to death a few feet away as he heroically subdues a psychotic murderer.

Personal story about police being useless up to a point. I had a bicycle stolen from me, and I reported it to the police along with the serial number. A year and a half later, someone took it to a pawn shop where it was discovered to be stolen. The police went and got it and talked to the person who pawned it. Of course, the guy who pawned my bike said he bought it from someone else but refused to say who he got it from--which in my book is called protecting a criminal. What do you think the police did with this guy? They let him go without charges. At least I got my bike back. The criminal is still out there, probably stealing more bikes now that he knows he can get away with it, even after he's been caught!

Anonymous,Don't ever try to sell that bike. If you do, it will pop up in their computer, and in the middle of the night a SWAT team will smash down your door and shoot you and everyone else in your house to death, unarmed or not - For trying to sell your own bike. Of course your death will be ruled a proper use of force and according to proper procedure. But it's better than being sent to jail, where you might be boiled to death or asphyxiated with a plastic bag filled with pepper spray tied over your head, not as nice ways to die as a bullet. So be grateful to the cops for their services to you.

Did you see this, grigg? The awful congresswoman Maloney is trying to have Larry Pratt and the GOA investigated by the police because of the recent Rolling Stone propaganda piece quoting Pratt as saying the 2nd amendment was meant to scare the govt and keep them in check from tyranny. She is basically proving the point of Madison in federalist 46 and Hamilton in federalist 28, and those guys were moderates compared to Sam Adams and Jefferson and mason!

While you're at it: the Constitution forbids the military from enforcing the law but there's nothing about militarizing the police and use them to subjugate the population.

It's interesting you noted that the modern police originated from Robert Peel is a reminder that like a singular currency and a standing military - the police force is a relatively modern invention. For much of history the rulers didn't issue currency and let the market decide. For much of history there was no official military but the men formed militias in times of invasion. And, of course, for much of history there was no standing police force so when crimes were committed it was expected the household had the right of self-defence but failing that the men would voluntarily band together into a militia to enforce the law.

"When a disgusted citizen tells an abusive police officer that he pays the officer's salary, the victim is committing a category error. Those of us who constitute the productive sector don't pay the police; they are paid by the people who plunder our property at gunpoint."

Truer words were never spoken. It's amazing how We the Sheeple mentally blank out this ugly reality.

Hey William!I'm a long time reader of yours and I was wondering if you ever write for reason.com? Some of their articles on police abuse are pretty good but nothing as detailed and succinct as your writings.

Just like to remind you that the House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans--the very folks who are always crying about freedom. Looks to me like they have the freedom to profit from defense spending and we have the freedom to get tazed, shot, and choked.

One evening my son and his girlfriend were driving home and had to stop for a traffic light. They we hit from behind at full speed by a foreigner driving drunk. The driver and his SUV just backed up and went on the run. When police were notified they said there was nothing they could do. As the couple we en-route to the hospital for treatment of there injuries. My other son and I went looking for the driver. He was found passed out hidden by the underpass exit just blocks away from where the accident occurred. It was our effort that brought justice that day, not the police as they were more interested in their Doughnut Run than in helping the public that pay their salaries and whom they supposedly serve. I cannot remember how many times I used to assist officers in trouble. In that they now represent The System they are on their own.

After spending 500 dollars on various fruit trees and bushes, and several days of grueling hard work planting them, somebody vandalized my property and tore out more then half of the 30 or so plants. I called the police in our mostly rural county. They arrived within the hour and the first words from their lips were, "what's your date of birth and social security number?" They also didn't seem very concerned and treated the whole thing as a waste of their time. Since it's necessary to "dig a 100 dollar hole to plant a ten dollar tree," I had suffered a huge loss. That was the first time I'd ever called the police to report a crime. It is certainly the last.

This is easily the most interesting, and certainly the most frustratingly on - the - nose article about the emerging police state I've ever read. I can only hope more people find it as infuriating as I do. As for you, you have a new reader.